Heeey.Hows life? Things here are pretty good. Right now I´m typing in a word document and am going to transfer it over later. Yay for ghetto internet cafes. Everybody here is busy watching goofy videos or something like that, and half of the computers are broken and so we´re stuck here going one at a time trying to not waste tooooo much time. Which is a pain too because last week we didn´t plan well, and Elder Wheatley didn´t get a chance to use his whole hour of internet. Partially my fault. Not cool. So we planned better this week, but yeah…. That’s how it goes around here.
Anyways. Things are great here. Getting all ready for changes again. Its crasy how fast this last one has gone by. It feels like a long time ago that I was an oficinista, but like just yesterday that I got here in Saltos. Funny how that works.Anyways. The news comes tonight so we´ll have to see how that goes. Theres potential for a descent amount of change, so we´ll see what happens. Its sad to think that after this one, I only have 2 more change days left in me before its goodbye Elder Humphreys. Crasy. I don´t really like to think about it. I´d be happy being a missionary for the rest of my life. Lol. That brings up the weirdest moment of the day though – I just recently got the trunkiest phone call that anybody ever gets on their mission. The ¨Hey… so I´m sending the info to get your plane tickets. Where do you want your final destination to be¨.Woah.Wasn´t expecting that one so soon. But apparently they are doing things a little bit ahead of schedule just because ¨summer¨ time is usually pretty busy. Oh well. Good thing I already have had a couple people telling me about my going home day and whatnot. Otherwise it would have been a bigger shock.
Anyways. No point in dwelling on that kind of stuff. These last 100ish days are going to be the best 100ish days of my mission. Which will be pretty cool because this last week for example were a really good 7 days. Tuesday we started the day by doing service. Usually we have district meeting in the morning, but the guy needed our help so we decided to just have our meeting a little later. We helped the member move some cheap crumbly bricks, take out an old barbwire fence, and dig a ditch so that he could put in a retaining wall sort of thing. All in a mornings work. Thankfully things go fast when there are 4 of you, and we didn´t get anything more than a couple scratches. Which was lucky because the wash lady is holding our dirty shoes hostage and so we had to do service in flip-flops/perfect Paraguayan style.Haha. We´ve also learnt that digging in this country is way funner than at home – not only is the dirt softer and easier to work with, but you wouldn´t imagine all the garbage and fun stuff that you find when digging. Lol. Anyways, our district meeting plan backfired when the zone leaders called and let us know that we were going to have a spontaneous conference call between the missionaries in the zone. Oops. So we had the first half of the meeting in our house, all muddy and in our slacker clothes. Haha. Anyways, the mission has been having a hard time lately getting baptisms and so apparently President was talking to the area presidency. Then he talked with the zone leaders. They decided that we just weren´t talking to enough people and so that the key to success was that we would have to start talking to more than 3 times the amount of people that we have typically been talking to in a week. So that was the plan. That meant a huge change in plans for most of us. A lot less looking for people that we already knew and a lot more time just talking to people. It kind of got us start wondering when we were going to ever be able to get any lessons in or actually teach anyone if we were going to be busy talking to so many people. Haha. But we have the promise that if we would talk to that many people from now on, we will find one golden family a week. Whoa. That’s a pretty intense promise. So, we took on the challenge.
Anyways. We went to work. Talked with a lot more people. We also had the blessing of being able to go out and work with Cleverson for a couple of days. He´s great and we´re having fun meeting all of his friends. At first it was a challenge talking to so many people. Finding the time. Talking with groups of people that you would normally just walk by. But its actually been really cool. Not only have we met tons of people (some of which seem to be pretty cool), but rather than taking away from our teaching time, its actually helped us to teach a lot more lessons and get lots of new investigators. We probably had one of the more successful weeks here in Saltos. Rather than wondering what to do if one of our visits fell through, we were busy the whole time. Good stuff. The real challenge now will be being able to get back and talk to all of those cool people, while yet still talking to all those people every day in the coming weeks. Wednesday I did a division with Elder Staker in my area. He´s the senior companion in our district. It was great. Had a really cool day. Cleverson went with us too. He´s becoming a great little missionary. Hopefully a future one. On Sunday we had to try and help one of the kids in the ward with the computer so that he could send off his mission papers. Its tricky because basically eveyone here is either completely computer illiterate, or at least 99% computer illiterate (most seem to know how to work facebook. lol). Hopefully one kid can teach the other and we can get a few missionaries out of this town within the next couple of years. It will do this place wonders.
Had an interesting thing pointed out to me the other day about Saltos. Its kind of a sad thing, but just an interesting note. Being such a tourist focused town, almost all of the teenagers actually work. Thats good that they want to be active and work, but it also means that this is one of the most un-talented, un-artsy places I´ve ever been to. In the words of the member, it just has a very low culture to it.Kind of sad. It great when you need a new pair of shorts, or a new jersy, but when it comes to having cool people that are into music, sports or anything like that, its kind of depressing. Anyways, thats just an interesting note on good old Salto del Guaira.
Thursday we had this super cool activity in the evening. There is no such thing as mutual here, but we try and have a ward get together every week. Well, sometimes the missionaries just get stuck in charge. Turns out that people were getting bored of a movie every week....lol. So this week they had a cool little play put on by a bunch of the recent converts. It was about the blessings of the gospel and doing missionary work. Turned out AWESOME. Great message, desent acting, and a really good turn out. Fun stuff. And I think it was because of it that we had a lot better turn out on Sunday. Hopefully they can keep up the good work.
Lots of rain this week. Lots of super muddy feet. You´ve never seen mud until you´ve seen Salto del Guaira. Dirtyest place I´ve ever lived. lol.
Saturday was elder Wheatleys birthday. I sneakily told acouple of the members about it and they gave him a surprise party. It was almost a disaster because they weren´t very sneaky, but fortunately Elder wheatley did a great job of not catching on. lol. It turned out great. Fun stuff.
Sunday we contacted people almost all day long to be able to get our goal. We´ll have to plan it a little bit better this week... oh well. met lots of cool people.
Anyways. Thats a wrap. Gotta go. I have internet now, so hope it all shows up. Glad to hear that you had a super cool Coldplay experience. Super jealous. haha. But yeah. Late as always. Have a good week! Love ya!
Elder Humphreys
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